A proposed surveillance system is supposed to target fentanyl, but there are fears it could be used to monitor abortion, pregnancy, gender transition, or any behavior the government wants to go after.
Editor’s Note: While many are celebrating the Supreme Court’s narrow victory preserving birthright citizenship, it is important not to lose sight of the broader picture. This was only one case, and one constitutional protection. The same Court continues to issue decisions that expand corporate power, weaken voting rights, erode protections for workers and immigrants, and […]
The MAGA world raged Tuesday at Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett for voting to uphold birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court’s ruling left right-wing pundits predictably fuming, as Donald Trump has made it perfectly clear that he believes the high court’s conservative justices—especially the ones he saw appointed to the bench—owe their fealty to him over the law. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh called Barrett the worst thing he could possibly think of: a woman.“It turns out that Amy Coney Barrett is a DEI hire, little better than Kentanji Jackson. Terrible pick,” Walsh wrote on X Tuesday. “When’s the last time we had a Republican president who didn’t put a liberal justice on the court?”“The worst Supreme Court Justices of all time have all been women. That’s just a fact. Republican presidents should take the hint,” Walsh wrote in a separate post, including an image of the high court’s four female justices. But Walsh had originally celebrated Barrett’s nomination in 2020, calling the jurist’s selection a “bullet proof choice.” Ouch. Conservatives had previously raged against Barrett last year after she joined the court’s liberal justices in dissenting against a decision granting Trump emergency relief to use the “Alien Enemies Act” to deport immigrants at whim. The fervor was reignited Monday after Barrett sided with the liberal justices to reject the Trump administration’s plan to gut mail-in voting.Speaking on her radio show Monday night, Megyn Kelly fumed that Barrett had become a “turncoat,” because she was “constantly siding with the left.”Before the Supreme Court had even delivered its opinion on birthright citizenship, Joey Mannarino, a far-right internet personality, wrote on X: “If Amy Coney Barrett really votes against ending birthright citizenship, we should begin to look into how to deport her Haitian child back to Haiti.”
The Supreme Court affirmed on Tuesday that that birthright citizenship is the law of the land. The decision, by Chief Justice John Roberts, upholds the clear meaning of the Constitution and knocks down the Trump administration’s attempt to deny citizenship to thousands of newborns every year. It’s no exaggeration to say that the case was […]
The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear a challenge to state and local bans on assault weapons, a move that could destroy restrictions on semiautomatic weapons like AR-15s—which are popular with mass shooters.While the court chose not to adjudicate the issue last year, four of the court’s six conservative justices at the time expressed their opposition to such bans on Second Amendment grounds. The issue will be taken up in the court’s next term in October.The specific bans that will be challenged originate in Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois—part of the greater Chicago area. Connecticut’s law is directly related to the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, in which Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children and six adults with an AR-15, a shotgun, and two semiautomatic pistols.“We will not back down from defending Cook County’s long-standing ban on assault weapons. These weapons of war are designed to inflict maximum carnage and have no place in our communities,” Cook County State’s Attorney Ellen O’Neill Burke wrote on X. “Countless victims have already endured the devastating impact of gun violence. We will defend this lawful ordinance before this nation’s highest court to continue protecting the people of Cook County.”
Joshua Scheer Birthright Citizenship Survives—for Now. The Project to Redefine Who Belongs Continues. In a 5–4 decision issued on June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees U.S. citizenship to nearly all children born on American soil, regardless of whether their parents are in the country legally or only temporarily. The […]
Donald Trump claims to have a trick up his sleeve to upend birthright citizenship—though his plan to do so would most likely run afoul of the law.The president downplayed the Supreme Court decision Tuesday that killed his attempts to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment, claiming that he and his allies could “easily make it up in Congress through Legislation.”“No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!” he wrote on Truth Social. “Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship. They will have my Complete and Total Support!”But that’s simply not true. Any attempt to change or alter birthright citizenship would require a constitutional amendment, since the right was enshrined in the Constitution in 1868 when Dred Scott was overturned and the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified.Accomplishing that would require a level of coordination and bipartisanship seemingly beyond the current Republican Party. A constitutional amendment requires a supermajority—two-thirds of both the House and Senate—to pass. Alternatively, the issue could technically be put to a constitutional convention, though two-thirds of states would need to support the motion to have one at all, and any proposed changes to an amendment would still require ratification by three-fourths of the states.The president was still embittered by the ruling hours after it was read at the bench, writing in a separate post that he “would like to congratulate President Xi, and the Great Country of China, on their massive Birthright Citizenship WIN.”In another post, Trump went on to claim that while the Supreme Court’s birthright ruling was a “loss” for his second-term agenda, he had actually won the “biggest and most consequential Decision” when the court extended him (by a 6-3 margin) sweeping new authorities over some two dozen agencies that were originally intended to be independent. That included granting him the ability to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission.